From Commandment to Commitment

by Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah

Each week, in addition to teaching, pastoral visits, meeting with members or friends of the synagogue to discuss issues related to their personal lives, the odd meeting connected with the running of the shul, writing emails and making phone calls, I also meet with people, who have contacted the synagogue for a variety of different reasons, and asked to talk with ‘the Rabbi’.  Sometimes, these meetings become the first step towards connecting to the congregation – more often they remain, simply, a step in the life of the particular individual, couple or family concerned, as they continue their own journey. 

Take this week for example:  I met a man in his thirties with a Jewish father and Jewish paternal grandfather, who was baptised as a Catholic, and has spent most of his life thinking about the Jewish part of his identity and whether or not he wants to inhabit more of it, and has now plucked up the courage to walk into a synagogue for the first time.   I met with a young couple, who have just had a baby boy.  He is Jewish, but was not brought up a Jew; she was brought up as a Catholic.  They are not involved in any religious community – Jewish or otherwise – and wanted to discuss the ins and outs of having their son circumcised or not.  I met with a young couple who are planning to get married in the summer.   While he has two Jewish parents, she was brought up as Jew, but has no Jewish biological connection, and they wanted to explore the possibility of having a Jewish wedding.

Most of the meetings I have with people who want to speak to me about a critical issue in their lives revolve around the themes of Jewish status and practice.  But each time I meet with an individual, a couple or a family, the issue is unique because it is about their particular experience – and no two particular experiences are ever exactly the same.  Life is complicated and complex – and a variety of people with different backgrounds and circumstances bring their complicated and complex lives to our door – to our door, the door of our particular synagogue more than to any other, because, of all the denominations within British Jewry, Liberal Judaism is prepared to respond to the needs of people who lead lives that do not conform to the Jewish norm. 

Liberal Judaism is living Judaism, concerned both nurturing the life of the Jewish community and with enabling individuals, couples and families to find their ways of living meaningful Jewish lives today.  In this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, the text turns from the story of our ancestor’s experience of the Divine Presence at Sinai, known as ‘Revelation’, to the nuts and bolts of the Mishpatim – the ‘laws’ governing worship, serfdom, injuries, property, moral behaviour, and a variety of religious practices – before picking up the narrative once more.  There are several legal codes set out in the Torah, written in different contexts, all of which are concerned with creating a framework for the life of the people Israel in the land they are to inherit for the express purpose of creating a society dedicated to the service of God.  Taken together, these codes, alongside the so-called ‘Ten Commandments’, outlined in last week’s parashah, Yitro, form a total system regulating the life of the people.

The sages whose self-appointed task it was to re-shape the laws governing biblical society in the context of a post-Temple Jewish world, in which the Jewish people was scattered over many countries, also created a total system – albeit, once we no longer occupied the land, the arena of Jewish life no longer included matters related to political governance and the state.  The Mishnah, edited around the year 200, and the commentary of later generations of sages, known as the Gemara, came together in a work known at the Talmud in two versions, one edited in the land at the beginning of the 5th century known as the Palestinian Talmud or the Yerushalmi, and a longer version, edited in Babylon a century later, known as the Babylonian Talmud or the Bavli.  The Bavli became the central text for Jewish life – but because it was a complex work, including scholarly debates and stories, as well as laws, as soon as it was complete, successive generations set themselves the task of creating more accessible codes of law. By the 17th century, the Shulchan Aruch – meaning ‘Prepared Table’ – by the Sephardi scholar, Joseph Caro, first printed in 1565, became the most authoritative code, with the inclusion both of the glosses of the leading Ashkenazi scholar of his day, Moses Isserles, as well as other commentators.

Much has happened in the world in general and in Jewish life in particular since the 17th century:  The dawn of intellectual Enlightenment, the collapse of the Ancien Regime that governed feudal societies, the evolution of Capitalism and political democracy, from the 18th century onwards – all these massive societal changes had an enormous impact on Jewish life, enabling, above all, individual Jews to make choices about how they wanted to lead their lives and Jewish communities to participate in the wider society.   Although notions of ‘progress’ took a battering during the 20th century, and the map of the contemporary world is much more complex than the modernists anticipated, the reality is that today, even those Jews whose lives are regulated by the Shulchan Aruch and who feel bound to bear ol hamitzvot – ‘the yoke of the commandments’ – do not keep all of the 613 commandments outlined in various different versions, simply because a significant proportion of the 613 are not operable anymore – for example, those concerned with duties related to the maintenance of the sacrificial cult, which hasn’t been part of Jewish life for almost two thousand years.

But I don’t want to reduce the issue of the commandments, the mitzvot, to a numbers game.  The question is not:  how many commandments does an individual Jew keep?  The question is: what sense do we make of our task as Jews living in the world today?  From a Liberal Jewish perspective, Judaism is not a total system unmediated by the world in which we live.  Like Orthodox Jews we accept our responsibility as guardians of our Jewish inheritance.  Unlike Orthodox Jews, we believe it is essential to adapt our heritage to the needs and demands of the age in which we live – for the sake of Judaism.  Just as the early rabbis adapted and developed the inheritance they received to meet the needs of Jewish life after the Second Temple was destroyed, so we are engaged in a similar process.  The word Halachah, which is usually translated as ‘Law’, actually comes from the root Hey Lamed Kaf meaning to ‘go’ or to ‘walk’.  From the time Abraham and Sarah first left their home, the Jewish people has continued moving from place to place, from epoch to epoch, and just as our ancestors in the wilderness carried the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, with them on their journeys, so we have always taken our inheritance with us.  But every time we have found ourselves in a new place, in changed circumstances, we haven’t simply got the old book of instructions out and set up camp in precisely the same format:  each new terrain has challenged us to do it differently.  So, the project of living a Jewish life hasn’t changed, but the ways we live as Jews have changed in response to the changing world in which we live.

Over two years ago now, I began to develop a new way of thinking about our responsibility for Jewish Life as Liberal Jews called Compelling Commitments, that in my view encompasses all the demands of Jewish life today, both internal and external, particular and universal.  I’ve spoken about them before.  Let me today, on Shabbat Mishpatim, remind you what they are:

Compelling Commitment One: 

Embracing Jewish Teaching and engaging with knowledge in the wider world

The commitment to nurture and cultivate our own Jewish lives and the life of the Jewish people as a whole, by continuing to learn and engage with the Torah, with our Jewish stories, teachings and traditions, and by participating in the various ritual acts, which celebrate Life with Jewish flavours, colours and tones.

And: 

The commitment to engage with the accumulating wisdom of the world, to study and to learn about the major developments in human knowledge, and to find ways of ensuring that the developing wisdom of humanity in all its dimensions connects with and informs Jewish teaching. 

Compelling Commitment Two: 

Sustaining the Jewish Community and repairing the world

The commitment to honour both those that have gone before us and those who are yet to be born, by becoming links in the chain of the generations of our people, and by maintaining, restoring and re-creating Jewish communal life in Britain, in Israel, and throughout the world.

And: 

The commitment to love not only our neighbours, but also the stranger in our midst; to liberate the oppressed, protect the vulnerable, and support the fallen; to pursue justice and to seek peace; to participate in the great task of Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world.

Compelling Commitment Three: 

The Eternal is our God and The Eternal is One

The commitment to explore the meaning of existence, to journey, to search, and to listen out for the voice of the Eternal, who calls each Jew to become part of Am Yisrael, the people who ‘struggle with God’, and to strive to sanctify Life each day through our actions and our relationships.

And: 

The commitment to acknowledge that the Eternal is One, and to work together with all the peoples of the world to recognise the essential unity of existence in all its diversity.

Compelling Commitments – not a set of Commandments from on high; but rather: a framework for addressing our responsibility, as individuals and communities, both to honour our inheritance, and to respond to the world around us.   As we read at the end of this week’s portion, our ancestors at Sinai promised not only to act on what they’d heard, but also to continue to listen, when they said, ‘na’aseh v’nishma’, ‘we will do and we will listen’ (Exodus 24:7).  Next week’s Torah portion, the parashah, Terumah, which begins at Exodus chapter 25, centres on the account of the building of the Tabernacle in the wilderness: the first great collective project undertaken by our ancestors.   When people are discussing the issues of contemporary Jewish life, they often focus on the so-called problem of ‘individualism’.  What they tend to forget is that real community is only possible when individuals – like the ones I have met with during the past week – are invited to participate in the community, bringing their own particular gifts and interests with them.  In the first verses of Terumah, the Israelites are told to bring of their own ‘free-will’ gifts for the building of the Mishkan (25: 3b-7):    

Gold, and silver, and brass; / and blue and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goat’s hair; / and rams’ skins died red, and seal-skins, and acacia-wood; / oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil, and for the sweet incense; / onyx stones and stones to be set, for the [priest’s] cape and for the breast-plate.

We are challenged not to ‘keep commandments’ but to commit ourselves, our particular abilities and talents and gifts, to the great project of Jewish Life:  May each one of us find our own ways of making that commitment.  And let us say:  Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah is Rabbi of Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue

This sermon was given on Shabbat Mishpatim - 5th February 2005